At the approach to this curious bridge, we were halted amid a dense crowd of foot-passengers in the everlasting fez—sprinkled with bowler hats and the headgear of every European nation—and made to pay five piastres (10d.) for the right to pass. In order to prevent any passenger evading the toll, a row of Turkish officials stood across the road, clad in a conspicuous enough uniform—a white smock.
The Golden Horn was of a very ordinary mud colour, and below the bridge, prosaic enough with its crowd of steamers and the busy ferry-boats that ply up and down the Bosphorus and to the Asiatic shore. The wharfs were lined with unbeautiful Customs, port, and shipping offices, backed on the rising ground by the indescribably hideous imitation French and Viennese architecture of Galata and Pera. Tall barracks with rows and rows of filthy windows looked out upon the prospect, and at their vis à vis in Stamboul across the water, and, crowning the mountain of wall and window formed by the successive tiers of houses up the hill-side, rose the Tower of Galata, a circular erection topped by a Turkish flag.
A Mixed Crowd
The roadway of the bridge being laid with large baulks of timber placed transversely, no two of which ever arrive at a common level, prevents rapid travelling even were the road clear of foot-passengers, who use it in preference to the footpaths. The Galata end plunges into a street absolutely packed with human beings, carts and carriages, where all the money-changers of Galata—Constantinople’s business town—seem to have congregated. A turn to the right leads to more trams, and a long and weary cobbled street of shops large and small, along whose pavements saunter the deck-hands of steamers hailing from every European and Levantine port. Greeks of course are in the majority, many in their national costume of blue tights, with a huge and pendulous posterior, coloured shirt and little zouave jacket, and a hat of the “pork-pie” order. Armenians, too, abound, and Levantines of all kinds. Italians, in this Italian quarter of Galata, are everywhere, and the language of the streets is anything except Turkish. Here and there an incongruous group of fierce and savage fellows, with packs of stuffed leather upon their backs—the Constantinopolitan edition of “the Porter’s knot”—shout and joke in a tongue understood of none even in this cosmopolitan city. They are Kurds, the strongest, most manly of the population, and the most despised, probably for those very qualities—in this town of sharping and guile.
Leaving this street and crawling up some very steep inclines lined by tenement houses, the carriage reached a long road running along the side of the hill. I suppose it should be called a street, for want of a better, or worse, name; but as we associate the word with another order of thing, it is well to explain that this, an important enough artery of Galata traffic, was—and doubtless still is—a wide alley of cobble paving, with huge holes at frequent and irregular intervals. In the absence of underground drainage, the paving sloped to the middle, and after filling the holes, the excess liquid filth flowed downhill. The solid variety, however, to which every resident contributed with assiduity, lay in heaps and figures about the street, proclaiming in the language of putrescence the quality of the inhabitants. In describing this main street of the Italian quarter,[1] I have described most of Constantinople, excepting only a few excellent streets on the Bosphorus side of Pera, where the wealthy foreigners live.
At the door of a kind of restaurant I was deposited, and no sooner had the carriage stopped than an ancient woman opened the door and welcomed me in fluent Italian. As my knowledge of that language is limited, she called loudly for “Marie,” a shrewd and kindly woman of about thirty, who appeared from a sort of cellar from behind the eating-room, and in French informed me that she had a room, told me the very reasonable terms, and asked for a deposit; and very soon I found myself installed in an uncarpeted apartment furnished with an iron stove, a bed, a washhand-stand, and a small table. This was the best room. A powerful and eloquent odour pervaded the house, telling of the thoroughly Italian nature of the cooking, and hinting at the existence of innumerable cesspools on the premises. I found afterwards that there were five latrines in the house.
It needed but a dinner in the eating-room to complete the tale of excellence of this exceptional pension, where one met Armenians and Levantines performing the usual skilful feats with knives and awkward morsels, regarding the fork as an instrument fit only for the inexperienced and timorous.
Next morning I climbed by devious alleys, and through lakes and torrents of filth to Pera, and spent hours trying to find better accommodation at a moderate price; but after being shown the loathsome dens of various Armenians and Greeks, and retiring with the best grace possible before the astonishing charges of every clean and relatively wholesome place, I was fortunate enough to meet a Russian, a tenant of an “appartement”—the Constantinopolitan flat—who wished to find an occupier during a three months’ visit to Moscow.
MY LIFE IN PERA
To my great delight the “appartement”—in a new building close to the Pera Palace Hotel, in one of the best parts of Constantinople—was clean and well-furnished, and we closed, with as much satisfaction on his side, I hope, as on mine. At any rate, he insisted upon sealing the arrangement with innumerable “aperitifs,” followed by vodkas and liqueurs at various brasseries about Pera, and having become friendly with a resplendent lady of Roumania, he bade me farewell and departed with his new acquaintance.